American Men of Mind Part 21

However, he was soon to render the country a service which will never be forgotten. In 1861, he appeared before the navy department with a plan for an iron-clad consisting of a revolving turret mounted upon an armored raft. He secured an order for one such vessel, to be paid for only in the event that it proved successful. The majority of the board which gave the order doubtless laughed in their sleeves as the inventor withdrew, for what chance of success had such a vessel? There were some who even doubted whether she would float--among them her builders, who took the precaution of placing buoys under her before they launched her four months later.

Of the voyage of the little craft from New York to Hampton Roads, and of her epoch-making battle with the Merrimac we have already told. Ericsson had asked that she be named the "Monitor," as a warning to the nations of the world that a new era in naval warfare had begun, and that she was well-named no one could doubt after that momentous ninth of March, 1862. Honors were showered upon the inventor, whose great service to the nation could not be questioned. The following ten years of his life were devoted to the construction of his famous torpedo-boat, the "Destroyer,"

which, he believed, would annihilate any vessel afloat--the predecessor of all the torpedo-boats, past and present, which have played so important a part in naval warfare. He lived for more than twenty years in a house in Beach street, New York, where he died, in 1889.

The Monitor's attack upon the Merrimac would have been ineffective but for the remarkable guns with which the little craft was armed--two eleven-inch rifled cannon, the invention of John Adolph Dahlgren.

Dahlgren had been connected with the ordnance department of the navy at Was.h.i.+ngton for many years, and his inventions had revolutionized United States gunnery.

Dahlgren was born at Philadelphia, where his father was Swedish consul, a position which he held until his death in 1824. The boy, from his earliest years, had been ambitious to enter the navy, and finally, at the age of seventeen, received his mids.h.i.+pman's warrant. In 1847, he was a.s.signed to ordnance duty at Was.h.i.+ngton, and began that career of extraordinary energy, which lasted for sixteen years. He saw almost at once the many defects in the cannon which were at that time being manufactured, and soon offered a design of his own, which proved a vast advance over old guns. The Dahlgren gun, as it was called, was of iron, cast solid, with a thick breech adjusted to meet varying pressure strains. The invention of the rifled cannon followed, and it was this weapon which caused even the great armored Merrimac to tremble. Admiral Dahlgren's career was a distinguished one, but no service he rendered his country was more noteworthy than this.

But there are triumphs of peace, as well as of war, and one of the most notable of these was won by Cyrus Hall McCormick when he invented the automatic reaper which bears his name. In 1859, it was estimated that the reaper was worth $55,000,000 a year to the United States; William H.

Seward remarked that, "owing to Mr. McCormick's invention, the line of civilization moves westward thirty miles each year"; and the London Times declared, after it had been tested at the great international exhibition of 1851, that it was "worth to the farmers of England the whole cost of that exhibition." To few men is it given to confer such benefits upon mankind, and the career of this one is well worth dwelling upon.

Cyrus McCormick was born in 1809, in a little house at the hamlet of Walnut Grove, Virginia. His father was a farmer, and was also something of a mechanical genius, and as early as 1816, had tried to build a mechanical reaper. His son inherited this apt.i.tude, and helped his father in mechanical experiments, soon quite outstripping him. As a farmer's boy, his day's work in the fields began at five o'clock in the morning, and in the harvesting season even earlier. But in the harvest field, he found himself unable to keep up with grown men in the hard work of swinging the scythe, and so devised a harvesting-cradle, which made the work so much easier that he was able to do his share. At the age of twenty-two he invented a plough, which threw alternate furrows on either side, and two years later, a self-sharpening plough, which proved a great success.

Then he turned his attention to a mechanical reaper, though his father warned him against wasting time and money on so impracticable a project.

But the possibility of making a machine do the hot hand-work of the harvest field fascinated the young man, and he set to work upon the problem. It was not an easy one, for the machine, to be successful, must not only work in fields where the wheat stood straight, but also where it had become tangled and beaten down by wind and rain. In 1831, he produced his first practicable machine, making every part of it himself by hand. Its three essential features have never been changed--a vibrating cutting-blade, a reel to bring the grain within reach of the blade, and a platform to receive the falling grain. The problem had been solved.

Three years, however, were spent in perfecting the minor working parts, then another was built and tested. It worked well, but McCormick was still not satisfied with it, and not until 1840, was it perfected sufficiently to make him willing to put it on the market. This self-restraint was remarkable, but it had this good effect, that when the machine was finally offered to the public, it was not an experiment. So there were no failures, but a steady increase in demand from the very first, until the great factory, which McCormick early located at Chicago, now turns out nearly two hundred thousand machines a year. The whir of these machines is heard around the world--everywhere the McCormick reaper is doing its share toward lightening man's labor.

Another of the great victories of peace was won by Elias Howe, when, in 1844, he invented a machine which would sew. Strangely enough, he was at first regarded as an enemy of humanity, rather than as a friend; an enemy, especially, of the poor sewing-women who earned a pitiful living with the needle. Few had the foresight to perceive that it was these very women whose toil he was doing most to lighten!

Elias Howe, born in Spencer, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1819, as the son of a poor miller, and was put to work at the age of six to contribute his mite to the support of the family. He was a frail child and slightly lame, so that, after trying in vain to do farm labor, he went to work in the mill, and afterwards in a machine shop, where he learned to be a first-cla.s.s machinist--knowledge which, at a later day, was to stand him in good stead. He married, at the age of twenty-one, and three children were born to him. Then came a period of illness, during which the young mother supported the family by sewing; and as Howe lay upon his bed, watching his wife at this tedious labor, the thought came to him what a blessing it would be to mankind if a machine could be devised to do that work.

The idea remained with him, and finally led to experiments. Of the many disappointments, the long months of patient labor, the intense thought, the repeated failures, there is not room to tell here; but at last he hit upon the solution of the problem--the use of two threads, making the st.i.tch by means of a shuttle and a needle with the eye near the point.

In October, 1844, he produced a rude machine which would actually sew.

Another year was spent in perfecting it, while he kept his family from starvation by doing such odd jobs as he could find, and in the winter of 1845, he was ready to introduce his machine to the public.

But here an unforeseen difficulty arose. The public refused to have anything to do with the machine. The tailors declared it would ruin their trade, and refused to try it; n.o.body could be found who would invest a dollar in it; and Howe, in despair, was forced to put his invention away and to accept a place as railway engineer in order to support his family. Some disastrous years followed, his wife died, and he was left in absolute poverty, but at last came a ray of light. A man named Bliss became interested in Howe's invention, and a few machines were made and marketed in New York. Riots among the workingmen followed, so serious that for a time the use of the machines was stopped; but no human power could stay the wheel of progress, and as the value of the invention came to be recognized, all opposition to it faded away.

Howe's royalties grew to enormous proportions, but he had been broken in health by his years of struggle and hards.h.i.+p, and lived only a few years to enjoy them.

George Henry Corliss was another mechanical genius, who, in one respect, antic.i.p.ated Howe, for about 1842 he actually invented a machine for st.i.tching leather. That was two years before Howe made his discovery.

But Corliss was soon attracted to other work, and the development of the sewing machine was left for the other inventor. It was in 1846 that Corliss began to develop those improvements in the steam engine which were to revolutionize its construction. One trouble with the steam engine as then built was that it was not uniform in motion. That is, if the engine was running a lot of machines their speed would vary from moment to moment, as they were started or stopped. For instance, a hundred looms, all running at once, would run at a certain speed, but if some of them were shut off, the speed of the others would increase, so that it was very difficult to regulate them. Again, there was a tremendous waste of power, so that the fuel consumption was out of all proportion to the power actually developed.

It was these defects that Corliss set himself to remedy, and he did it simply by taking a load off the governor, which had always been used to move the throttle-valve. In the Corliss engine, the governor simply indicated to the valves the work to be done, and the saving of fuel was so great that the inventor often installed his engine under a contract to take the saving in coal-bills from a certain period as his pay. One of his great achievements was the construction of a 1400 horse power engine to move all the machinery at the centennial exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876. The engine, which worked splendidly, was one of the sights of the exposition.

What the sewing-machine is to the needle, the typewriter is to the pen.

No other one invention has so revolutionized business, and the credit for the invention of a practicable typewriting machine is due to C.

Latham Sholes. Others had tried their hands at the problem before he took it up, but he was the first to hit upon its solution--a number of type-bars carrying the letters of the alphabet operated by levers and striking upon a common centre, past which the paper was carried on a revolving cylinder.

Sholes had a varied and picturesque career. Born in Pennsylvania in 1819, he followed the printer's trade for a number of years, and it was no doubt from the type that he got his idea of engraved dies mounted on type-bars. Finally he removed to Wisconsin, where he edited a paper and soon became prominent in the politics of the state, holding a number of appointive positions. It was in 1866 that he began to experiment with a writing-machine, and his first one, which was patented two years later, was as big as a sewing-machine. Still, it embodied the essential principles of the typewriter as it is made to-day, and after spending five years in perfecting it, Sholes made a contract with E. Remington & Son to manufacture it. It is one of the ironies of fate that the name princ.i.p.ally connected with the typewriter in the public mind is that of the manufacturer, the ident.i.ty of the inventor being completely lost, so far as applied, at least, to the name of any machine.

We have spoken elsewhere of the career of John D. Rockefeller, of the immense fortune he made from petroleum and the manner in which he disposed of a portion of it. It is worth pausing a moment to consider the career of the two men who discovered petroleum, who sunk the first well in search of a larger supply, and who put it on the market. There is scarcely any development of modern life to rank in importance with the introduction of kerosene. It added at once several hours to every day, and who can estimate what these evening hours, spent usually in study or reading, have meant to humanity?

In the early part of the century, whales were so plentiful, especially along the New England coast, that whale, or sperm, oil was used for lighting purposes, and many of the old whale-oil lamps are still in existence. The light they gave was dim and smoky, but it was far better than no light at all. As the years pa.s.sed, whales became more and more scarce, until sperm oil was selling at over two dollars a gallon. Only the richest people could afford to pay that, and the poor pa.s.sed their evenings in darkness.

In 1854, a man named James M. Townsend brought to Professor Silliman, of Yale, a bottle of oil, asking him to test it. This was done, and the astonished professor found that here was an oil, whose source he could only guess, which made a splendid illuminant and which also seemed to have some medicinal properties. The oil was from Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, and Townsend, a.s.sociating with himself a conductor named E. L. Drake, formed the Seneca Oil Company and began gathering the oil by digging trenches. At first it was bottled and sold for medicinal purposes at one dollar a gallon; then Drake suggested that a larger supply might be secured if a well was bored for it. A man familiar with salt well boring was employed, and in 1859 the first well was begun at t.i.tusville.

Most people regarded Drake as a madman, and thought that he was simply throwing money away. The work was costly and slow, and finally, when $50,000 had been spent without result, the stockholders of the company refused to go further--all except Townsend. That enthusiast managed to rake up another $500, which he sent to Drake, with instructions to make it go as far as possible. It did not go very far--and yet far enough--for one day the auger, which was down sixty-eight feet, struck a cavity, and up came a flow of oil to within five feet of the surface.

Pumping began at the rate of five hundred barrels a day, and fortune seemed in sight. But three months later, the company's works were destroyed by fire, and before they could be rebuilt, scores of other wells had been sunk, many of which were "gushers," requiring no pumping, and the supply was soon so far in excess of the demand that the price of oil tumbled to one dollar a barrel. Discouraged by all this, the Seneca Company sold out its leases and disbanded, leaving Townsend and Drake poorer than they had been before their great discovery.

Years ago, in 1790, to be exact, an Italian scientist named Galvani, experimenting with the legs of a frog, happened to touch the exposed nerves with a piece of metal, while the legs were lying across another piece. He was astonished to see the legs contract violently. Further experiments followed, and the galvanic battery resulted. Years later, our own Professor Henry discovered that if an insulated wire carrying a current of electricity was wrapped around a piece of soft iron, the latter became a magnet. Out of these simple discoveries, came the electric telegraph, and, still more wonderful, the telephone, by which the human voice may be instantly projected hundreds of miles, not only intelligibly, but with every tone and inflection reproduced. In an age of wonders, this is surely one of the greatest.

On February 14, 1876, two applications were made at the patent office at Was.h.i.+ngton for patents upon the conveyance of sound by electricity. One was filed by Elisha Gray, the other by Alexander Graham Bell. They were practically identical, but it was Bell's good fortune to be the first to make his device practically effective, and so he may fairly be considered the inventor of the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, the son of the famous Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of the system by which deaf people are enabled to read speech more or less correctly by observing the motion of the lips. The family moved to Canada in 1872, and Alexander Bell came to Boston, where he soon became widely known as an authority in the teaching of the deaf and dumb. The reproduction of the human voice by mechanical means interested him deeply, and his study of the construction of the human ear, with its drum vibrating in response to sound vibrations, gave him the idea of a vibrating piece of iron in front of an electric magnet. He was, however, very poor and had no money to expend in experiments--so poor, indeed, that when attacked by illness, his hospital expenses were paid by his employer, and so friendless that during his illness no one visited him except two or three pupils from his school.

He persevered with his experiments, with such rude apparatus as he could make himself, and the first Bell telephone was brought into existence with an old cigar-box, two hundred feet of wire, and two magnets from a toy fish-pond. In an improved form, it was shown at the Centennial exhibition of 1876, where Sir William Thomson p.r.o.nounced it "the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph." As is always the case, the public was slow to appreciate the importance of the invention, and as late as 1877, Bell was unable to secure $10,000 for a half interest in the European rights. The rapid growth of the business in this country is almost without a parallel in history, and no invention has added more to the convenience of modern life.

A distinguished scientist one day asked the late Clerk Maxwell what was the greatest scientific discovery of the last half century, and Maxwell answered without an instant's hesitation: "That the Gramme machine is reversible." Probably the whole scientific world will agree with him, for that discovery meant that power will not only produce electricity, but that electricity will produce power. Let us see how that has been applied. Falling water is one of the most powerful agents in the world, and at a great waterfall like Niagara, millions of horsepower go to waste every day. So at the foot of Niagara, great power-houses have been built where the power of the water is converted into electricity. The electricity is conducted along wires for hundreds of miles to the great industrial centres, and there converted back again into power. In other words, the water of Niagara is to-day turning machinery in Buffalo and Albany. The same method of producing power, the cheapest that has ever been discovered, is being installed all over the world, and will, in time, produce a revolution in manufacturing processes.

The vital mechanism in the production of this power is the dynamo, and it is to Charles F. Brush, of Cleveland, Ohio, that its development is princ.i.p.ally due. He was interested in electricity from his earliest years, and when he was only thirteen, distinguished himself by making magnetic machines and batteries for the Cleveland high-school, where he was a pupil. During his senior year, the physical apparatus of the school laboratory was placed under his charge, and he constructed an electric motor having its field magnets as well as its armature excited by the electric current. He devised an apparatus for turning on the gas in the street lamps of Cleveland, lighting it and turning it off again, thus doing away with the expensive process of lighting them and turning them out by hand.

After graduating from the University of Michigan with the degree of mining engineer, he returned to Cleveland, where, in 1875, his attention was drawn to the great need of a more effective dynamo than the clumsy and inefficient types then in use. In two months, Brush had made a dynamo so perfect in every way that it was running until taken to the Chicago Exposition, in 1893. Six months more of experimenting resulted in the Brush arc light, and in 1879 the Brush Electric Company was organized. A year later, the first Brush lights were installed in New York City, and now there is scarcely a town in the country which does not pay tribute to the inventor.

Let us turn for a moment from the field of electricity, in which America has been pre-eminent, to another in which Yankee ingenuity has also led the world--the railroad. It was in this country that the sleeping-car, the diner, the parlor-car were first used; no other country affords such luxury of travel; and no other country has added to railroading any device comparable in importance to the invention of George Westinghouse, the air-brake. Before its introduction, to stop a train brakes must be set painfully by hand, and even then were not always effective. Now, the engineer, by pulling a single lever, sets the brakes instantly all along his train, and so effectively that the pa.s.sengers sometimes feel as though the train had struck a rock. More than that, should any accident occur, breaking the train in two, the brakes are instantly set automatically. All of which is done by the power of compressed air, working through a series of pipes and air-hose beneath the cars.

George Westinghouse's father was superintendent of the Schenectady Agricultural Works, and it was there that the boy found his vocation.

Before he was fifteen, he had modelled and built a steam engine, and followed that with a steel railroad frog, which was so great an improvement over the frogs then in use that it was soon widely adopted, and brought the young inventor both money and reputation. He moved to Pittsburgh, as the centre of the iron and steel business, and began the manufacture of his frogs there.

One day he came across a newspaper account of the successful use of compressed air in the digging of the Mont Cenis tunnel, in Switzerland, and the thought occurred to him that perhaps a railroad train could be controlled by the same agency. He worked over the problem for a time, but when he mentioned his idea to his friends, they were inclined to think it absurd to suppose that a rubber-tube strung along under the cars could work the brakes effectively. However, Westinghouse was not discouraged, but continued to experiment, and the air-brake as we have it to-day was the result.

Which brings us to the most remarkable genius in the field of invention the world has ever known--the man who has made invention, as it were, a business, whose life has been devoted to rendering practical and useful the dreams of other men, who has reduced invention to a science--Thomas Alva Edison. There are some who are inclined to belittle Edison's achievements because some of the greatest of them have been founded upon the ideas of others. He is best known, for instance, as the inventor of the modern incandescent light; but the discovery that light may be obtained from wire heated to incandescence in a gla.s.s bulb from which the air has been exhausted, was made when Edison was only two years old.

Experiments with this light were made by a dozen scientists, but it remained a mere laboratory curiosity until Edison took hold of it, and with a patience, ingenuity and fertility of resource, in which he stands alone, made it a practicable, efficient and convenient source of light.

That the incandescent light, as it is known to-day, is his through and through cannot be questioned.

It is as a scientific inventor that Edison likes to be known. He abhors the word discoverer, as applied to himself. "Discovery is not invention," he once said. "A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident, while an invention is purely deductive. In my own case, but few, and those the least important, of my inventions, owed anything to accident. Most of them have been hammered out after long and patient labor, and are the result of countless experiments all directed toward attaining some well-defined object."

There is, however, one modern marvel for which Edison is wholly responsible, both for the initial idea and for its practical working-out--the phonograph--but let us tell something of his early life, before we relate the achievements of his manhood.

Born in a little village in Erie County, Ohio, in 1847, Edison was early introduced to the struggle for existence. His father was very poor, being, indeed, the village jack-of-all-trades, and living upon such odd jobs as he was able to procure. The boy, of course, was put to work as soon as he was old enough, and of regular schooling had only two months in all his life. At the age of twelve, he was a train-boy on the Michigan Central Railroad, selling books, papers, candy, and fruit to the pa.s.sengers. He managed to get some type and an old press and issued a little paper called the "Grand Trunk Herald," containing the news of the railroad. One day, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the little child of the station-master at Port Clements, Michigan, from under the wheels of a train, and in return the grateful father taught the boy telegraphy.

It was the turning-point in his career, for it turned his attention to the study of electricity, with which he was soon fascinated. At eighteen, he was working as an operator at Indianapolis, but he was from the very first, more of an inventor than an operator, and his inventions sometimes got him into trouble. For instance, at one place where he had a night trick, he was required to report the word "six" every half-hour to the manager to show that he was awake and on duty. After a while, he rigged up a wheel to do it for him, and all went well until the manager happened to visit the office one night and found Edison sleeping calmly while his wheel was sending in the word "six." But he nevertheless developed into one of the swiftest operators in the country, all the time devising changes and improvements in the mechanism of telegraphy.

His first great success came with the sale of an improvement in the instruments used to record stock quotations, which enabled these "tickers" to print the quotations legibly on paper tape, and this success enabled him to get some capitalists to finance his experiments with the electric light. The arrangement was that they were to pay the expense of the experiments and to share in such inventions as resulted.

For the sake of quiet, he moved out to a little place in New Jersey called Menlo Park, and built himself a shop. Then began that remarkable series of experiments--one of the most remarkable in history--which resulted in the perfection of the incandescent lamp.

The problem was to find a material for the filament which would give a bright light and which, would, at the same time, be durable, and with this end in view, hundreds and hundreds of different filaments were tried. The difficulties in the way of this experimenting were enormous, since the light only burns when in a vacuum, and the instant the vacuum is impaired, out it goes. At one time, all the lamps he had burning at Menlo Park, about eighty in all, went out, one after another, without apparent cause. The lamps had been equipped with filaments of carbon and had burned for a month. There seemed to be no reason why they should not burn for a year, and Edison was stunned by the catastrophe. He began at once the most exhaustive series of experiments ever undertaken by an American physicist, remaining in his laboratory for five days and nights, dining at his work bench on bread and cheese, and s.n.a.t.c.hing a little sleep occasionally, when one of his a.s.sistants was on duty. It was finally discovered that the air had not been sufficiently exhausted from the lamps.